Chain Gang Women

This is a truly dreadful film. Despite its name, it is not a WIP outing. Nor indeed is it a convincing road movie (which I think is what it is trying to be).

It takes two guys half an hour to escape their unexciting prison confines, finding their couple of girls- and then that's basically it. Acting is dreadful and unredeemed by any of the usual sexploitation compensations. If you want nudity and violence, then go elsewhere. In fact go elsewhere anyway. On any basis you are wasting your time with this trash.

This is pure advertising 101 right here. You have a movie about a boring prison and two unappealing convicts that escape when the lone lardass sheriff is attacked on said chain gang. If the story was good and the action well paced then you would bill this as "Chain Gang Convicts" or "Escape from Prison Hell". Or you can look at your finished product, lament over what you created, and bill it as something it is not. Voila! You now have Chain Gang Women. I truly pity the poor dupe that paid for a ticket expecting titillation via semi-nude forlorn beauties in prison only to watch this crap. The first half-hour of this tripe is spent inside of a Georgian prison that looks eerily like southern California where we meet Harris who has six months to go until he is a free man. Harris has been sent to this labor camp to finish the rest of his prison term. While there he is chained/partnered with the brutish murderer Weed who is eager to escape. I thought of escaping too by the time they get around to fleeing the prison. On the lam we finally get to see one of the two, count em' two women in this movie as the convicts hide in Harris' wife's house where she is promptly raped by Weed. Charming. After securing a change of clothes the trio attempts to go north to Atlanta in hopes of evading the dragnet. When that fails they resort to strong-arming the inhabitants of a farmhouse and wait the rest of the night out. Here we meet the second and by far the most bizarre of our women as the very young beauty is apparently married to Colonel Sanders. This poor girl not only has to kiss this decrepit old man but also gets to become Weed's second rape victim in two days. Had enough "chain gang women"? Good, because there is no more much like the plot of this movie that ends with a bang. Offscreen of course. How this movie was named Chain Gang Women in the first place is beyond me but the fact that it was retitled Women in Chains in England is even more mind boggling! A better title would have been Coma Induced Audience.

A dull 'home invasion' type thriller from Crown International Pictures. The film has nothing to do with the exploitative title, which makes it sound like one of those Filipino women-in-prison movies starring Pam Grier. Instead, it's a stodgy, slow moving tale about a couple of escaped convicts who take some women prisoner in their own homes.

It has much in common with the film WILD RIDERS, although it's nowhere near as sleazy in feel. In fact, it's rather dull and tame, and has little nudity. The actual jailbreak scene takes half a film to happen, and the resulting home invasion thrills are very diluted and lacklustre. As is so often the case from this era, the film only really gets going at the very end. Production values are sub-par, the acting is non-existent, and the film as a whole is a chore to sit through. Much like a lot of Crown's output, then.

Billy Harris has only 6 months left to serve for grass. He gets transfered out of the easy library job into hard chain-gang Georgia State Labor Farm. He is chained up with Mike Weed who supposedly killed a girl. The prisoners attack the guards and everybody makes a break for it. Harris doesn't want to run but Weed threatens to chop off his leg. They go to Harris' girlfriend Ann. While Harris is out, Weed rapes Ann. They avoid a road block and stop at a farm where the farmer has a really young wife.

This is a horribly misleading title. The filmmaking is amateurish. The lead actors are not that compelling. They're not bad as amateur actors but don't expect more than that. Harris and Weed are set up for some very compelling conflict but the movie doesn't develop it. The farmer and his wife provide some additional possibilities. However I have no rooting interest in any of them.

This is a classic example of the worst sort of stuff used to hook in the grind-house crowd back in the 70's. Its title, poster and trailer would have been used to sell it but of course the movie itself bears no relevance to what could reasonably be expected from a film entitled Chain Gang Women. It's an escape convict movie with two women in minor roles in the latter half of the film. And not a very interesting escape convict movie at that. The acting is of course awful and the sexploitation element negligible. There are a couple of rape scenes where the women seem virtually disinterested in being sexually assaulted; which makes it less grimy but overall pretty ridiculous. The film totters on from scene to scene with very little dynamism until it ends with an ending that is, to say the least, underwhelming. So there's not a lot to recommend here to be perfectly honest. The most interesting element of the film is the quad-screen segments, and the soundtrack was pretty appropriate I guess. Other than that, it's strictly limited thrills and spills in this one I'm afraid.